Are any downsides to changing FPS from 24 to 60?

[Rares Molnar]

Hello. I am currently involved in a huge project and I want to deliver the best quality possible. Until now I've created several animations using 24FPS. This is the moment I want to change the FPS from 24 to 60FPS (I've testes the 60FPS version and it looks so smooth...). Can someone tell me which are the expected downsides of this change? Thank you!

[David Arbor · Accepted solution]

The only downside you might experience is a performance one. Time doesn't change obviously, so one second is still one second; this means you are now trying to render 2.5 times the number of frames in the same time. Also, any parameter that's based on a per/second attribute might need to be increased, which can also lead to higher render times. I often render certain sequences at 60 fps from CH when I feel the action isn't smooth enough, but 60 fps doesn't necessarily mean higher quality than 24 fps, it just means smoother. If that's what you're looking for, then go for it, and if things feel a little less choppy during playback of your timeline, this is likely the cause.

[Rares Molnar]

Thank you for your answer!

[alank99101739]

If you have existing recordings and change the FPS, the playback speed of recordings will change too. So once you set it, you cannot change for that scene later.

So if you record things in replays, you might have problems here. They won't rescale automatically per scene.

If you are using keyframes, then 60fps should be smoother, but you might want to check the frame rate of body or face tracking via the webcam. If it can only capture data at 15fps on your hardware for example (lots of compute going on for those features!) then 60fps for those movements won't help. (I don't know how to measure it.) 

Neither are reasons not to do 60fps, just additional points to think about.

[Rares Molnar]

Thank you so much for the explanation. It helps me a lot.